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CAPTAIN AMERICA www.postmagazine.com 24 POST MAY 2016 grapples with Iron Man, you need to make sure he's grabbing something as big as the Iron Man armor and not just a person's normal size. What was called, the 'photo-ready' version, the 'football suits' in Iron Man 3, eventually evolved to what we called the 'displacement suit' for Civil War. It gave me the size of the suit but was softer that the stuntmen could wear – it was more comfortable but still, when 'Cap' grabs Iron Man's arm, he's actually grabbing something that's the correct width. As we become more savvy with the films, we find better ways to shoot with the different characters. "With Captain America: Winter Solder, the shield even evolved with the films. If you go back to Captain America: The First Avenger, the shield had a shinier, brushed metal look, and it got duller and duller as the films progressed. That's something we went back and looked at and said, 'That was a better looking shield,' so we ended up replacing the shield with the more brushed metal feel to recapture what we had in Captain America: The First Avenger. "In terms of technology, has it im- proved? I think it's something that allows us to stage a bigger and bigger spec- tacle as we proceed. We had just under 3,000 visual effects shots in Civil War and a lot of the shots are the spectacle shots, in the airport, but in addition we have the hidden shots we try to make as seamless as possible." Would you say there were any major overhauls in the pipeline, moving from production into post and with the visual effects? "On Winter Soldier, working with ILM, one of the bigger things they had to deal with, to move things through the pipeline, were the three Helicarriers that were based on the Helicarrier from The Avengers. That model was very heavy, and they had to deal with three of them for Winter Soldier. So they had to push three Helicarriers through their render pipeline. Then, when we got to this [film], we modeled the entire Leipzig airport, which made the Helicarriers look paltry by comparison. So I think our moving forward and looking to the things we wanted to create, was pushing and cre- ating environments and creating worlds that allow amazing amounts of details through the pipeline." Isn't there an age regression scene in the film featuring the Tony Stark character? "Yes, there's the shot of young Tony, which is about a 4,000-frame shot, where we took Robert Downey Jr. and made him about 23 years old for the length of the shot. And that was one of those shots that normally, if it was done in cuts, you could break it up and spread it over mul- tiple artists to finish each individual shot in a simpler way. But with the Russo's, they wanted the scene to feel a little bit off when you first see it. They wanted to do it as a single shot, rather than as multiple shots. So Tony wakes up on the couch, and he's a little further away from the camera, and has a conversation with his mother. When she leaves, present-day Tony Stark shows up in the background. So, in addition to it being a very long shot with the de-aging, it was also something that was shot in multiple passes. It was shot in a house just outside of Atlanta that there was no way to get big motion control equipment in there, the space was just too small, so we just married the two pieces together in addition to doing the age regression. That took quite a bit of time, because you want to define what made a young Tony Stark." Would you say that the age regression scene and the airport battle are two of the more prominent scenes in the film? "Yes, we wanted a large feel and scope to the film. If you look at the opening of the movie [which takes place in] Lagos [Nigeria], the opening of the film was actually shot in Atlanta and we needed to make it look like Lagos. Unfortunately, at the time, the Ebola outbreak was happening in Africa, and there are some things we definite- ly had hopes of filming in Africa, but we weren't able to go. So, we went to Puerto Rico, since it is a coastal city like Lagos, and a lot of the architecture worked out fairly well, but in terms of shooting time, we were not able to shoot in Puerto Rico. So, we went down there with an effects unit, shoot- ing many plates — aerial plates, drone plates, scanned, surveyed and then shot plates off a camera truck, all to make the initial fight. We kept the foreground pieces of Atlanta and replaced all the background pieces to make it look like Lagos. So, a large challenge of the film was to try and make Atlanta not look like Atlanta (laughs). But in terms of scope, the final battle, probably the big- gest battle was handled by ILM and the finale with 'Cap' facing off with Iron Man VFX super DeLeeuw says it took 14 vendors to complete around 3,000 visual effects shots. Tools included Maya and Nuke.